Thank you for your work! I always wondered how those worked, and where the info came from, on top of what it runs on etc -- moreover I love seeing software built that directly improves people's lives :)
Limiting it to this sort of context (deliberately excluding web stuff, where there may be more argument): I don't believe there is anything nice the ads are paying for.
Maine has no billboards for several decades now, and miraculously our state has not suffered existence failure, and we still build and sell a bunch of nice stuff.
Never believe a marketer telling you that you NEED marketing. Life will go on even with very limited marketing. You and your neighbors do not need it. Capitalism does not fall apart if it gets more expensive to force someone to learn about your product when they do not want to.
The (almost) same thing happens near Boston's South Station. There are some TVs that show timetables of upcoming trains/buses, except that they added ads. So, if you want to know how many minutes you have to catch a train, wait 30 seconds for the ads to be over first.
The subway system I'm most familiar with has two systems:
1. All cars have a configurable display that shows text. It is constantly scrolling through boilerplate that is not conceivably helpful to anyone, like "Don't spend too much time looking at your phone". But if you watch it for a minute or two, eventually it will briefly display the name of the next stop before going back to the boilerplate.
2. Some cars, but not all cars, have a stylized layout of the subway line embedded over the windows. There are lights running between the stops, and those lights are red if that part of the track has already been covered and green if it hasn't been. The part of the track where the train is currently located, and the upcoming stop, have some other status, which I think is an unobtrusive flashing.
The fact that this map display cannot show any information other than the current location of the car means that it shows this information at all times, making it millions of times more useful than the configurable text display that all cars have and fail to use appropriately.
But there are no ads either way. There's just the good system and the terrible system. I would argue that software to control this kind of display is a fundamentally misguided endeavor - the more controllable it is, the worse the user experience will be, because the people controlling the display are not interested in the user experience.
Not that they couldn't reserve on the ads screens a narrow (let's say 100-200 pixels tall) band at the bottom of the screen to show the path with the green and red lights like the (good) ol' system.
If only Garmin had an unlocked LTE watch, it would be perfect. I had been eyeing the Garmin Instinct Solar, with "infinite" battery and Garmin Pay, but to be able to leave my phone home I'd need LTE
I've got the instinct and couldn't be happier with it. Definitely going to be rebuying/upgrading to whatever is next if it ever bites the dust, which it probably won't for a long time since it's also rugged.
Without any activity tracking it lasts ~40 days on a charge, and charges in about an hour. If you live somewhere sunny like I do, even with tracking it lasts practically forever cause of the solar panel.
The flashlight also seemed like a gimmick at first but it's surprised me in how often I reach for it
I don't care about the usual smartwatch crap. I already have a phone, not gonna be sending messages on my watch, but I guess that can be a bummer if you care about it.
Fwiw, Garmin has their inreach platform, and their watches can talk to their transceivers. So not LTE, and not second device free, but an inreach is about the size of a zippo and has global satellite coverage
It's unfortunate that with Samsung phones you can't uninstall the myriad of bloat apps, not to say of their telemetry volume (compared to Apple at least).
A friend of mine once had a Samsung phone that had advertisement on the Home Screen and was having a hard time removing it. He did reset the phone and all.
This was ten fricking years ago, and I never really looked close to know what it really was, but it was enough to put me off the brand forever.
Until recently, of course: I thought about getting a TV from them. But I ended up with an "OK" brand dumb TV instead of a Samsung because the Samsung TV on the shop also had an AD in it.
Samsung can become another Apple, but it's gonna take some effort.
> Samsung can become another Apple, but it's gonna take some effort.
For sure, and I hope they will, further competition is always good. I dont know numbers but I guess the ad revenue must be significant since the "generational leaps" and innovations on the mobile department arent there.
I only have a Samsung tablet and I could either disable or uninstall all of their apps. Also, I think you can remove them effectively with `adb`, without root, but haven't tested.
> how can you recognize companies such as your friend's
The signs I've picked up so far:
- Privately owned by the founders (engineers)
- A sense of carefulness when hiring
- Few employees quit the company at all
- Either entirely engineer-run or a few soft-skilled workers with high EQ and social status
When the founders are a family, things get a little weird, because the family weirdo gets tolerated.
- The people you speak with have been at the company for a long time
- The fairness and quality of the interview process (especially w.r.t. the tech screen)
If multiple people you speak with have been with the company for more than 10 years, it's a great sign. And if the interview is really high quality and fair (such that it is an accurate representation of your skills), it's a really great sign for company quality in the intangibles.
The company I just joined is like this, and I can totally understand why people don't leave to try to continue up the total comp pyramid elsewhere.
I’m Danish so this might not apply to an American context, or even a non-Danish context. I’ve been on the hiring side of things a few times, and I’ve worked in a lot of different organisations, and what I personally look for these days is companies which let you interview them as much as they interview you. This shows that they are looking for someone to be the right fit and that they know this process goes two ways.
I had an offer recently where it was online, it had gone through one of those ridiculous LinkedIn recruiters and it had been completely “missold” (not sure what the English word for misleading a “sale” is) to me. I figured this out after about 5 minutes of me asking them questions about their place and the work they wanted me to do, at which point I flat out said something along the lines of “I think I’m the wrong fit” to which they agreed, but they wanted to offer me another type of job in architecture and management. I didn’t want that, but the process of them being very open to me interviewing them helped us both out immensely in not picking each other.
It’s obviously only something you can really engage in if you don’t “need-need” a job.
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